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Monthly Archives: October 2007

The Daily Show has launched a spiffy new website, with what appears to be their full archives posted in an interface that represents a quantum leap from Comedy Central’s clunky, hard-on-the-RAM “Motherload” player. Also, it lets you embed those videos anywhere you might happen to want to:

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross notes cautiously that classical music is doing quite well in the dot-com age, propelled by the long tail effect, greater ease of entry via music blogs and iTunes, and more communication between classical nerds. In the course of it, he links to a variety of classical blogs and resources – I’m going to spend some time following up.

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg takes on the nonsense about Hillary Clinton’s laugh, and makes a remarkably sensible point that even the Daily Show has missed:

Hillary’s laugh is unusually uninhibited for a politician—especially, perhaps, for a female politician. It is indeed a belly laugh, if not a “big belly” laugh, and it compares favorably with the incumbent Presidential laugh, a series of rapid “heh-hehs,” at once threatening and insipid, accompanied by an exaggerated, arrhythmic bouncing of head and shoulders in opposite directions. [emphasis added]

Steve Kriss has some reflections from his summer pilgrimage in this week’s Mennonite Weekly Review. Perhaps appropriately, Steve doesn’t come to any strong conclusion, but he makes the journey look much better than the destination.

Saint Andrews treats as a foundational Western thinker, right up there with Plato and Aristotle, a 19th-century theologian named Robert L. Dabney — a Confederate Civil War chaplain who described blacks as “a morally inferior race,” a “sordid, alien taint” marked by “lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, waste.”…None of this makes it into Worthen’s article. In fact, when she does give a three-word quote to a Wilson critic, she uses the occasion to sarcastically describe how the woman took “two hours to detail Wilson’s crimes” — almost none of which are mentioned. Instead, Worthen refers lightly to Saint Andrews’ “chronic spats with liberals in town.”

Honestly, it was ridiculous that the Times gave no space to the multifarious connections between NSA and white supremacy. The absurdity of NSA’s intellectual pretenses pales next to the outrageous positions of its founder.